Gadgetory

you don't need me to tell you that blackberries had a rough few years nobody's buying its phones anymore and the new BlackBerry 10 operating system has pretty much been a flop so to fix all that blackberry is releasing this phone the $700 Prive and guess what it runs real Android but it still has some of that classic blackberry DNA this is the phone that's supposed to save the company let's see if it's up to the job let's start with the great stuff this might be the best hardware that BlackBerry's ever put to market it starts to the lovely 5.4 inch curved AMOLED display the pixels melt away and you can tweak the color settings to your liking the Snapdragon 808 processor and three gigs of RAM usually keep things moving at a steady clip and there's expandable storage here too blackberry put a really grippy material on the back that makes this big phone surprisingly easy to hold even with the keyboard open the battery is huge and it usually gets me through the day but you want a blackberry for the keyboard and so the screen slides up to reveal one and BlackBerry managed to do it without making the phone feel thick or even awkward and it's open and is it any good yeah it is look here's the deal with physical keyboards on phones I like them I think they feel great to type on and yes I know you can type way faster on a touchscreen but you know what you can optimize for a lot of stuff on a computer that doesn't necessarily feel good and typing on this phone I think feels great and really that's all that you matter the keyboard also has some neat extra features you can slide your finger on it to scroll you can double tap to move the cursor around and there are handy shortcuts in some apps you can swipe up to autocomplete words swipe down to get a big list of symbols it's almost like the perfect melding of classic blackberry and modern Android and it's that almost that gets me blackberry has a lot of really good ideas about how to make Android better but it falls down on the execution I've had this thing get crazy hot I've had it hard crash on me pocket-dialed people and a bunch of notifications just aren't the prim is just too buggy but beyond the bugs there are other problems with the software take the BlackBerry hub it lets you take all sorts of incoming messages email text Twitter or Facebook and combine them all in customizable views so you have a one-stop shop for all the stuff that people throw at you every day but it doesn't work well with Gmail it kicks you out to other apps all the time and realistically BlackBerry is never going to get enough third-party support to make it a real success the hub should be great but it's just not there yet you can turn off all this blackberry stuff and just use it like a regular Android phone and if the company can kill these bugs it would be a great phone the camera actually takes pretty good photos even in low-light but it's just embarrassing ly slow and that's not okay anymore this thing is called the Prive which is short for privacy and blackberry nails that it's better than your average Android phone and helping you know that it's secure that's thanks to a little piece of auditing software called D Tech BlackBerry security and privacy tools seem really smart but beyond the Wall Street set I'm not sure many people are actually clamoring for that perv is also short for privilege which I don't even know what that means except that I guess you have to be privileged to be able to spend 700 bucks to get a phone that has a physical keyboard but a lot of the time this phone doesn't make me feel privileged it just makes me feel frustrated I still have a ton of nostalgia for blackberries the Privy is supposed to be the phone that gives me permission to come back to participate in the big world of apps and Android while keeping all that blackberry stuff that's a good start it's the right start and I really do love a lot of the things that BlackBerry is trying to do here but too much stuff here is either slow or unfinished and even though it could all be fixed in software updates waiting for blackberry to fix it software is a really old story and nobody should be a nostalgic for that